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Bastard. The PAL version of Animal Crossing still doesn't have a release date. It's supposed to only really work if there's more than one of you playing it - visiting other people's towns, posting messages and trading items with them seems to be the main drive behind the game. As more people visit your village, so it changes. The best description I've heard places it as a kind of offline take on online, community-based games.
Pahtasy Star Online good. Phantasy Star Online very good. I lost a couple of months to it on the Dreamcast before the servers became overrun with imbeciles. It's unlike anything else I've played before or since, teamwork and - again - communication being the key to enjoying it. I don't know how the GC version is going to structure the servers, but hopefully you'll still be able to choose to play on Eurpean, American or Japanese ones as you see fit - the Japanese servers were always the most fun.
Basically, you create a character (the options for physical appearance allow you to come up with something fairly unique, far more so than yr Everquests and the like) and take them onto one of the servers. There' you join up with three other people and choose a level to work through - the levels are pre-defined mazes. And that's it. You run through the level, killing stuff as you go and collecting items and cash. Whjat makes it unique is the atmosphere - people genuinely co-operate. If you're just starting out, you'll easily find a high-level player who's willing to help you earn some cash or share out the items that they no longer want. You can swap 'guild cards', which are effectively a means of seeing when that person is online and which server they're on, sending them messages in real-time or as a form of email. Alternatively, you can just hang around in one of the lobbies and chat. The chat functions are exceptional - you can either converse through icons, a pre-defined set of words that will automatically translate for you (so you can talk to Japanese/French/German players in their own language without having to translate it yourself, and they can do the same back to you) or just normal, typed-text. Typically, Japanese players are generally more than happy to communicate in English once they find out where you're from.
Like I say, the Dreamcast version was about as close to an online utopia as anyone's reached so far, up until the point where idiots started hacking the game, acting like Knodgers or - believe it - selling low-level players powerful weaponry/armour/items for real cash on eBay, in all three cases completely ruining the whole point of the game. Wankers. It's best to get as much out of the GC version as soon as you can, because the same is almost bound to happen to it. |
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